The present disclosure relates generally to material handling of containers, packages, and discrete articles, and more specifically to techniques for segregating articles for order fulfillment and store replenishment within a material handling system.
In order to reduce the cost of storing a large inventory, increasingly retailers and distributors rely upon systems that can rapidly receive wholesale quantities of particular articles and create subsets of different articles as consumer or store replenishment orders. In some instances, a large number of possible types of articles can be selected from to complete a particular order. Automation allows conveying selected articles from a receiving location, sorting the needed articles into an order container, and transporting the completed order container to a shipping location. Generally, human interaction is required along some portion of the otherwise automated material handling system.
Requirements exist for certain types of articles that contain very sensitive, valuable, or statutorily controlled materials to tightly control specific individuals that can access the articles. In addition, single or double validation procedures can be required to confirm that any particular article is correctly received, stored, sorted and shipped from a material handling facility. Finding human operators that qualify to do such work can be difficult. In addition, correctly performing the validation steps by the human operators can be a time consuming and inconvenient process.